Something is going to happen--the presentiment is
sure. But what, but what? They search the night in vain. Meantime,
motionless and silent waits the figure of the veiled woman. It is
Cassandra, the prophetess, daughter of Priam of Troy, whom Agamemnon has
carried home as his prize. Clytemnestra returns to urge her to enter the
house; she makes no sign and utters no word. The queen changes her tone
from courtesy to anger and rebuke; the figure neither stirs nor speaks;
and Clytemnestra at last with an angry threat leaves her and returns to
the palace. Then, and not till then, a cry breaks from the stranger's
lips, a passionate cry to Apollo who gave her her fatal gift. All the
sombre history of the House to which she has been brought, the woe that
has been and the woe that is to come, passes in pictures across her
inner sense. In a series of broken ejaculations, not sentences but lyric
cries, she evokes the scenes of the past and of the future. Blood drips
from the palace; in its chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of
Thyestes wail in its haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the
past that one of the future floats and fades, clearly discerned,
impossible to avert, the murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear
of that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer who sees in
vain and may not help.
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